NodeJS

The future of Web Applications: NodeJS

NodeJS becomes more and more popular for backend development and indeed NodeJS with its tons of Modules has the potential to be a serious competitor for the old web workhorses PHP / MySQL.

NodeJS - which means basically server side javascript - is very tempting because most Web Developers write Javascript already regularly when it comes to frontend development. How cool would it be to write frontend and backend Code in the same language? With NodeJS it is possible!

Besides that improvement of comfort, NodeJS has some other important benefits:

it’s completely asynchronous and event driven: the application is not blocked while waiting for example for a database result. the application can do many things at the same time which makes your application fast

NodeJS does not 'forget': A running node application (web server) can save data over several requests just in a variable. With PHP you always had to store data in a database or a session.

Since NodeJS was published the first time in 2009 a growing community developed tons of modules. Now NodeJS seems to be grown up and some modules / technologies persisted or turned out to be best practices. The following list is the result of that development and is more or less an equivalent to the LAMP Stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) - it is called MEAN:

MongoDB: MongoDB is a the database (NoSQL)

Express: web application framework for node. With Express you can turn node into a web server